Emotions Go Viral on Facebook

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Feeling down? Happy? Angry? No matter how you're feeling, you can
now blame it on your friends' most recent Facebook posts.

A new study published on March 12 in the journal
PLOS ONE discovered that emotions can spread via Facebook.
While positive Facebook posts tend to generate other positive
posts, negative posts tend to generate negative ones. But here's
the good news: Positive posts tend to be more "contagious" than
the negative variety.

"For every one happy message that you write, our study suggests
that your friends who live in other cities will be influenced by
that to write an additional one or two posts themselves," said
study author James Fowler, a professor at the University of
California, San Diego.

"That means that these emotions that you're feeling and
expressing aren't just felt by you, they're felt by your friends
as well," Fowler told Live Science. [ The
Top 10 Golden Rules of Facebook ]

Emotional contagion

Previous research has shown that emotions, whether positive
or
negative, can indeed be contagious.

In the new study, Fowler and his colleagues analyzed anonymous
data on Facebook status updates from the top 100 most densely
populated cities in the United States between January 2009 and
March 2012. The researchers used rainy weather as an instrument,
measuring how people reacted to drizzly skies in their Facebook
posts and how their posts in turn affected what their friends
wrote.

"If it rains on your friend in New York, is it making you a
little more miserable on a sunny day in San Diego?" Fowler said,
describing the question the study aimed to address.

The answer, the researchers discovered, is yes.

The findings may have both positive and negative consequences for
the public, Fowler said.

"Now, more than ever, we feel what the world feels," he said.

In it together

As the use of social media encourages an exchange of positive
emotions, this effect could create an "epidemic of well-being"
across the world, Fowler said.

But there is also a downside to the mechanism discovered in the
study, he said. As people from around the planet communicate
through social media, and their emotions become more uniform,
" our
mood, globally, is going up and down together," which was not
typical of the pre-Facebook era, Fowler said.

Now, it is more likely that many people around the world feel
down at the same time, he said.

"It is possible that this increase in the correlation of our
emotions might also lead to greater volatility in our political
systems," he said, referring to the role that social media played
in the Arab Spring, allowing people to not only coordinate their
actions, but also transmit their feelings about political events.

But why do positive emotions spread more readily than negative
ones? Fowler offered two possible explanations.

"We tend to self-censor negative emotions," he said, adding that
people frequently avoid showing their negative emotions, as they
don't want these emotions to spread to other people.

The structure of Facebook itself provides another potential
reason for the easier spread of positive emotions, as the site
"is explicitly designed to promote the spread of positive
messages," for instance through features such as the "Like"
button, Fowler said.

Future research should try to determine the relative role of
these two factors (the human tendency to hide negative emotions
and Facebook's "positive" design) in favoring the spread of
positive emotions, he said.